VOGONS

Medieval: Total War / Shogun: Total War

Topic actions

First post, by Unloader_loader

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Newbie
Rank
Newbie

Hi there,
this solution was posted in the Steams forums as well.
It bascially allows for modern systems to play Medieval TW and Shogun TW to be played at high fps and in decent resolution.
It works quite nicely but there is some strange behaviour with these two games, which (afaik) use the same engine.

the phenomenon:
in battlemode:
It's that if you activate the status bar with F6, the framerate drops quite a bit. For me (AMD RX 7600) it drops only 20fps (from stable 60 to 38-ish) but for others it's more noticeable i guess.
Tried it with an nvidea card (more RAM, more power), and it actually became worse (fps: 30).
The only increase in speed was when i reduced the ingame resolution to 640x480, then the fps are kinda in the 50's. But never stable 60 like without the icon bar.
It gets worse the more i increase the battlefield resolution. (Currently I use 1024x768.)
But even if i reduce the settings, the problem presists; there is always a drop in fps once the icon bar is activated. This happens in Shogun TW, as well as in Medieval TW.

I'm using Win 10 64bit, i7 core, 16 GB RAM
dgvoodoo2 settings: API Direct3D 12 (feature level 12.0), Resolution 1680x1050, Antialising 8x.

Any idea what could be causing this?
I can't understand why such a simple icon bar can cause such a loss in fps. It's just bitmaps / sprites?

Reply 1 of 2, by Unloader_loader

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Newbie
Rank
Newbie

Additional observations:
i recorded the gameplay footage with the tool Bandicam in Window-Fullscreen mode (since recording in Game-mode results in crashes) with a recording speed of 60fps.

But when i watch the footage it jumps to 30fps once in the menue, and stays there. Even if I turn the icon bar off (with F6) and ingame it's fluent 60fps, the footage stays at 30fps, regardless of what my actual fps were at the moment of recording.
Very strange behaviour, and it makes me think there is some hardcoded fps limiter at work ingame. Or maybe something vsync related? (its turned of in my dgvoodoo2 settings btw).
Tried to find something with a HEX-editor (finding "30" "Fps" and so on) in the .exe but it didnt change anything - but I was just wild guessing anyway. 😜

I remember running it on Windows 7 with DXWND and somehow getting it to 60fps and more with an even older AMD card and no dgvoodoo2.
Yet I tried multiple tools by now; DXWND (but to no avail), D3DOverrider, DXwrapper, ddrawcompat (getting only blackscreens) and even Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit (Act). But this game won't budge.

Reply 2 of 2, by Unloader_loader

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Newbie
Rank
Newbie

Alright, I tried diffrent things now, I bought a new monitor with 165 Hz, so I could see the full fps generated without the iconbar (before i had only a 60hz monitor), and it nestled at nice 120fps. without the minimap it rises to like 130-140 fps, but that's not the biggie. because as soon as i activate the iconbar it goes back to the old 38fps. so no change there. i even tried FreeSync (AMD), no change either.

I also tried to install a virtualbox with windows 7, directx 9 and hardware acceleration and even there (with a intern gpu) it slows down the fps as soon as i turn on the iconbar. so it cant be the gpu? of course it was way slower than regular starting it, because of it being a virtual pc.

something I noticed: I encoded some videos while starting the game, and the fps dropped quite a bit, so i think it might be cpu related? something happens in the game when the iconbar is turned on.
but with the same cpu and even slower gpu-card i managed to run it with iconbar on 60+ fps on windows 7 (and dxwnd but that doesnt do it anymore, i tried everything in that), so I know it must have something to do with windows 10 or directx in some capacity.
this may need a debugger / hex-wizard, I guess.

Go to top of page Go to top of page
Back to dgVoodoo General
Close window
Close window